Chapter Two

With surprising agility, the discount starship hurtled through the wreckage of a hundred thousand dead vessels.

Calling it a discount starship is perhaps too kind—the Afterthought was a pile of rusty scrap metal that just happened to have three thrusters and an engine.

Shaped like a falling raindrop turned on its side—with the front end at the fat part of the drop—the ship gave off the impression, the correct impression, that it could fall apart any second.

That made the pilot's high-speed flight through the ship graveyard all the more impressive.

Rachel-7 pulled the scow into a barrel roll between two abandoned stellar yachts about to collide, shot through a spinning column of green ice shards that had been a luxury cruiser, and spun the ship ninety degrees clockwise, counter-clockwise, and clockwise again to dodge three razor-edged emergency beacons made jagged from millennia of debris collisions.

After forty-seven hours of similar gut-wrenching moves, Rachel-7 put the ship down on the starboard lower half of a slowly rotating forty-story tall metal cylinder.

Inside the Afterthought’s cluttered control room, the mechanical life form named Trakspoke to the artificial intelligence named Rachel-7.

John, you might want to experiment with posting longer sections a few times a week for this chapter. The story does seem to move a bit slow because one can only read one page each day. Then again, I was always one to prefer books and short stories to serials, so maybe I'm not the best judge.